Hot Mess

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* "I hate the new blog!" "Where are the pictures?" "This looks boring!"

Yes. I know. We're working on it. On every other website on the planet, aligning an image to the right makes it look nice and tidy, as you would have seen on the previous blog incarnation. Wrestling with this new monster, we get a jacked-up result like so. (I am told the "national team" is working on this matter.)

Another issue is that HAL-9000 likes to generate "contextual links," meaning links I don't want cluttering up my blog will just automatically appear. I'm told I can manually go through after the blog is posted to blow them away, but this seems an annoying extra step. But you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. At the moment, my blog looks like someone filled a grenade launcher with ostrich eggs and pulled the trigger.

But I am convinced we will fix all this, and you will be enchanted with the end result. Stand by.

* Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Chicago's reigning Air Guitar champion. He goes by the name of "Nordic Thunder." NT told me the story of Bettie B. Goode, an East Coast air guitarist who totally jacked her foot during a competition and eventually had a toe amputated because of it. Choice quote: "By the time I hit the ground and looked down, my toe was pretty much gone and just hanging from a thread."

* "And if you through a party and invited everyone you ever knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say, 'Thank you for being a friend who I murdered and ate.'"

* Among the stupidest ideas ever is this: Changing the name of the Sci Fi Channel to "Syfy." Nerds are not a demographic you want to antagonize. They have access to mosquito death lasers.

* Speaking of nerds, the first official meeting of the Chicago Nerd Social Club is May 7. By their nature, nerds shun human contact, so this will be interesting. Probably one dude in a homemade Gimli costume sitting at the bar with a laptop, clicking through his "World of Warcraft" campaign, waiting in futility for other nerds to arrive..

* Finally, I give you... blind bowling. The alley owner is more than a little upset half his balls were rolled through the parking lot.